I have a 2.53 (A1283) that I have had for a few years, still going fine with Snow Leopard. But my wife has bought a new Macbook Pro 2.6 and she wants me to upgrade it to 16Gb of memory and I am wondering if it is worth trying the 8Gb modules in my mini.

Will they work? I know they are going to be over spec'ed - DDR3 PC3-12800, DDR3 (non-ECC) rather than the PC3-8500 the mini would need (as suggested by Crucial). No matter, they will be surplices to requirements so is it worth me fitting them?

I would like the extra memory - if they will work! Has anyone successfully tried this?

I have a 2.53 (A1283) that I have had for a few years, still going fine with Snow Leopard. But my wife has bought a new Macbook Pro 2.6 and she wants me to upgrade it to 16Gb of memory and I am wondering if it is worth trying the 8Gb modules in my mini.

Will they work? I know they are going to be over spec'ed - DDR3 PC3-12800, DDR3 (non-ECC) rather than the PC3-8500 the mini would need (as suggested by Crucial). No matter, they will be surplices to requirements so is it worth me fitting them?

I would like the extra memory - if they will work! Has anyone successfully tried this?

I have 8 gigs of memory in my MM and to me this quite enough. 16 gigs is way to much.

I don't want to use 16Gb in my machine - I was wondering about using the 8Gb that I take out of the Macbook in my old(er) mini.

Bandit Bill suggests it could be flaky, I thought it might be, but wondered if anyone had sucessfully done something similar. I probably won't bother with it as the last thing I need is to make a good, working, box into an unreliable PITA!

are they samsung crucial/micron or hynix. samsung may work but here is the scoop you have a c2d machine it needs an efi firmware to use a pair of 4gb sticks. apple does have it on their site. I have done hundreds of 2009 and 2010 minis with c2d 2.26 2.40 2.53 and 2.66 cpus. they are picky picky picky picky.

I have;

A) never had a pair of 1333 4gb sticks pass a long ram test.
rember ram is the typical test.

B) ddr3 1333 samsung 4gb sticks passed the first 2 out of 5 passes on remember ram test. then failed. every other 1333 ram failed on the first pass.

c) for in spec 1066 ram samsung is the gold standard about 20 for 20 passed. pny ram is good I have used 30 to 40 pairs of it. They were 20 good then a bad batch 5 or 6 bad then the rest good. I just sold some of it today on ebay.

I don't beleive you will be able to utilize 16GB in your machine, and as BB suggests 1600 is more than likely out of spec.

A novice user on this thread states that 16GB "is way to"(o) much. This may be true for you but depending on your usage you may actually find that 16GB is rather useful.

What is so great about using 16 gigs of memory???

16gb is useful if you run vmware fusion or parallel some people have a mini with windows 7 windows 8 and mountain lion. they set 8gb to mac and 4gb to each windows_________________2010 Mm 2.4 C2D oem 320gb hdd 8gb ram
2012Mm base 2.5 with 16gb ram diy fusion drive
2012Mm quad with 8gb ram oem 1tb hdd

Anyhow Marv... more RAM lets you do more things at once without slowing the computer down. That being said not everyone runs 10 programs at a time along with Windows... but some people do.

Many people also share a computer with multiple users ie. my workstation at work typically has 3 to 4 user accounts open simultaneously. I don't want to ask my co-workers to shut down their apps to free up the system resources. It's just isn't going to happen. We all usually have about 8 applications running under each user account. That's up to 32 applications running all day long, every day.

Here are a few other examples from other users.

I'm a web developer, who simultaneously runs Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I also run Coda 2...on top of this I perform cross-browser compatibility tests. I run Chrome, Firefox and Safari simultaneously, as well as Adobe BrowserLab (web based application). At the same time, I have Skype open in case a client needs to contact me. Additionally, I have FileZilla open, a program which allows FTP communications. I also have MAMP open, to establish a local server, iTunes to listen to music when work gets dull and Outlook, as another means for client communication.

Another user

After Effects alone can consume that much on some systems, especially in higher core count systems. 3d sculpting apps are a good use case for very large amounts of ram. if you're doing any texture/displacement work. In a lot of cases, you can work with 8GB or less. It's just that it can be extremely annoying. If it's cheap, there's no reason to put up with that if you're dealing with applications that push around a lot of data. I use 16 + a fairly large ssd. I do get pageouts...

4MB of RAM used to be the minimum to run Windows 95, now we have reached a point where the operating system alone requires 2GB or 2000MB (both Windows and OS X).

Whether you are going to get a good return on your investment by maxing out the RAM on your computer, depends on how long you plan on keeping your computer, how many programs you run simultaneously, the type of programs you run etc. If you plan on keeping your operating system and software up to date, more RAM is always better. It becomes the most critical component when trying to get longevity out of a system. I keep my computers for a very long time, so I always max out my RAM. Initially it is often overkill, but 5 years down the road, it is never enough. If I didn't upgrade the RAM, I'd probably only get about 3 years use out of the computer, so for me it's cheaper to max out the RAM. I enjoy the computer more the entire time, and instead of buying the RAM 3 years down the road when it is often more expensive (because it is no longer made in quantity) I'd rather do it initially and benefit from it the entire time.

You could try the out of spec ram as it is free but I would be stunned if it works.

Thanks Philip, I think I will just chuck the 8Gb that comes out of her Macbook Pro in the box and leave them there. Shame as I would like to have a bit more memory.

(I have been given a spare 320Gb Momentus XT drive that I will clone and fit at some point as they are meant to speed things up a bit!)

You can easily sell them. Anyone with a 2012 27" iMac could add the 8 GB to their system, bringing their iMac to 16GB (because they have 4 slots). That's a $200 upgrade option on the Apple online store.

Perhaps it's not worth your time, but you should be able easily get $75. $50 minimum.